


Find Your Way By Moonlight

by Starrie_Wolf



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Finding the Blue Lion, Gift Fic, M/M, Pilot Error, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Sheith Birthday Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-21 08:00:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12453039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starrie_Wolf/pseuds/Starrie_Wolf
Summary: "Youcame back, and that's all I've ever wanted for my birthday."





	Find Your Way By Moonlight

_It’ll be his birthday soon,_ Keith thinks.

They’re on the roof of the Garrison, way after curfew, the night breeze rustling at their clothes. It could’ve been any other night, Keith sitting on the roof looking up at the stars, hidden from casual view by the water tower, Shiro dropping by after his regular patrol rounds end at midnight.

But tonight’s different.

“I’m really sorry,” Shiro says into his hair.

Keith nods. He doesn’t think he can say anything, doesn’t think there’s anything he needs to say. All he can do is hold on to Shiro a little longer, breathe in a little deeper, and hope that he can keep this memory with him until Shiro gets back.

It’s two months and too many light years to Kerberos, and even with all the advancements in technology since humans started exploring the sky above them, instantaneous deep-space communications are impossible. The best he can hope for is a several-day delay on any email he tries to send Shiro, and that’s assuming zero electromagnetic interference anywhere along the way, and no priority transmissions clogging up the tiny ship’s bandwidth.

In short… that’s not happening.

Keith closes his eyes. His forehead drops onto Shiro’s shoulder, and as though it is a switch, Shiro’s arms tighten around him further.

It’s just four months, he reminds himself. Four months, by which time he’ll have graduated, and then they can be co-pilots for the rest of their lives. He can’t begrudge Shiro this chance, not when it’s what he himself would have given an arm to have, to be the first to touch the edge of the solar system.

“It’s okay,” he hears himself say, even though it really, really isn’t at all. “Bring me back a space rock?”

“I will,” promises Shiro.

☆☆☆

(It’s not just four months.)

☆☆☆

Pilot Error.

Like hell it was pilot error.

But the words flash across his vision every time he closes his eyes, like someone’s taken a knife and carved the words into the back of his eyelids, letter by letter.

Keith stops going to the roof. He’d stop sleeping too, but that isn’t really an option.

“How do you know?” he screams at Iverson, once. “What makes you say it’s pilot error?”

Iverson stares down at him, eyes cold and expression frozen. “That’s classified.”

He can’t take that lying down.

Keith wasn’t there personally, but gossip travels fast in the Garrison. He hears about an attempted break-in into Iverson’s office, about how soldiers had to drag away a girl with long, brown hair, how she spent the whole time screaming and kicking and insisting that the Kerberos crew _aren’t_ dead.

He’s not great at subterfuge, but he makes an attempt at it anyway.

It ends about the same way as that girl’s did: getting thrown out of the Garrison.

☆☆☆

There’s nowhere he can go but back to his childhood home.

The shack looks exactly the same as the way he’s left it, still the same dusty old place whose door he boarded up when he was seventeen.

But _Keith_ isn’t the same boy who left, the one who’d had dreams too big for his heart to hold.

He’s older, for one; dressed in clothes that don’t belong to him, for another –

He feels like he’s buried his heart in the desert.

☆☆☆

 _It’ll be his birthday soon_ , Keith thinks.

Has it already been a year since he left the Garrison?

Time sure seems to fly when there’s nothing to be held accountable to – no instructors, no peers, just him and his hoverbike, and the vast expanse of the desert stretching out before him.

And to think, he used to find this nothingness stifling, used to keep staring up at the night sky, wishing he could be up _there_ instead of down here.

_PILOT ERROR._

Shiro’s absence still ached, but it’s like a healed wound now, the new skin around the edges itching and pulling whenever he thinks too much about it, but no longer weeping blood across the desert sands.

Having something to focus on helps.

He can’t explain it, this, this _pull_ he’s feeling, the compulsion to keep exploring the cave systems, and he’s not sure if he wants to.

Maybe he’s going crazy.

Keith finds that he doesn’t really care about that either.

_Ten months, two weeks, three days and counting._

☆☆☆

Keith hangs his jacket over a chair, grinning a little to himself when he catches sight of the color.

“We make a great pair, don’t we, Red?” he asked out loud.

There’s a knock on the door.

He jumps a little – which, no, that can’t be his Lion, even if he won’t be surprised if Allura suddenly tells them tomorrow that their Lions can also shrink in size and walk through the Castle. Coran will probably say something like, “That’s why it’s called the Castle of _Lions_ , you know?”

“Can I come in?”

Keith shakes himself. Of course it’s not Red, though he can’t say he’s any less glad to see _this_ visitor. “Yeah,” he called through the door.

Try as he may, he can’t control the upturn of his lips when the door slid open to reveal Shiro.

“I’m sorry I didn’t bring you a space rock,” Shiro opens with that, looking abashed, the expression ridiculous on such a big, burly man he’s somehow turned into when Keith hasn’t been looking. The hilarity is compounded when he scratches the back of his head with one hand, like he used to, except his bicep flexes.

“It’s okay,” Keith says, and actually means it this time.

Now that they’re in a room together, away from potential prying eyes, he finally lets himself go, lets himself do more than just laying a hand on Shiro’s shoulder, lets himself do what he’s wanted to the moment he laid eyes on Shiro the previous night. Shiro bears his weight with the usual aplomb – with _more_ than that, even, given that he looks like he’s now hopped up on the alien version of steroids.

“ _You_ came back,” Keith says, voice muffled by Shiro’s chest, “that’s all I ever wanted.”

**Author's Note:**

> Reblog on Tumblr [here!](https://starriewolf.tumblr.com/post/166710196074/find-your-way-by-moonlight-vld-sheith). Thank you to vldexchange for hosting this!


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